The project will include headquarters, research and development facilities, hospitality buildings and a visitor centre for the hybrid rice seed production firm.

Located in Baoting County on Hainan Island, the development is being billed as a future ‘global centre for hybrid rice research; a showcase for sustainable development; and an international leisure destination’.

According to the practice, the design will maximise views of the ridge and the valleys below for visitors staying in new luxury private villas, club house villas and a proposed five star resort hotel.

In addtion a museum will showcase production technologies, global solutions and the story of rice cultivation in Asia.

Broadway Malyan director Jeremy Salmon said: ‘We are able to contribute to this prestigious, multi-faceted project as a result of our practice’s growing reputation in China for the delivery of fully-integrated, sustainable and future-proofed schemes, the unrivalled diversity of our expert designers, their world-class skills, expertise and distinctive client focus.’

Concept design work is underway, with detailed design work due to commence in the summer and construction expected to start in early 2013.

We took a decision more than ten years ago to build a presence on the ground on China. The decision was based on our then ambition to become a global practice but one with a local understanding especially in the newly emerging markets of the world.

This was part of a strategic growth in both Asia, the sub-continent and subsequently in South America. We’ve been in Shanghai for seven years, moving over the last three years to a mature design studio, authoring its own projects and accruing its own ability to provide clients with international design expertise manifest through a real understanding of how to make things progress meaningfully and with aspiration across the development team in mainland China.

We have avoided creating a representative office, with the ‘fly-in-fly out’ model only ever having a limited lifetime in an emerging market and this has been justified in the context of a growing self confidence amongst the successful and increasingly internationalised developers in China which are demanding their designer to be at hand and working with them in a fully iterative manner.

We are taking the long view on the importance of building a strong market-leading brand here for design and development expertise. This will include opening in other locations throughout the mainland over the coming years. While the market has tightened, especially with more inexperienced developers in second and third tier cities, the relationships that we’ve carefully grown with international and leading Chinese developers, as well as specialist end user clients such as Grand Agriseed Technology, are proving to be very resilient.

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